Tuesday, November 11, 2014

A great book for creating a 2D rpg in Unity!

Another
Unity game engine book from Packtpub was released in October, “Mastering Unity
2D Game Development” by Simon Jackson.This is an intermediate to advanced guide to using the 2D features of
Unity.The book centers around creating
a 2D RPG complete with world map, a conversation system, a store, and the
beginnings of a battle system.When the
book was initially released there were a variety of typos and show-stopping
problems with the book and code.Packtpub has recently reissued the book and code and now everything
works well.

Chapter
1 is an overview of the updates that occurred in Unity 4.3.I went through the book using Unity 4.6 beta
and had no issues. “Mastering Unity 2D Game Development” is definitely meant
for those with some experience using Unity and in particular the C# programming
language.Many links are provided for
reference throughout the book; but knowing how to use coroutines and delegates
will definitely help you complete the examples in the book.

Chapters
2 and 3 explain how to set up the foundation of the RPG project and begin with
having you create a 2D game character and animate it.Importing sprites and using the Sprite editor
are discussed and then Unity’s Mecanim animation system is explained while the
main character gets animated.

In
chapter 4 the background for your initial scene is created and then populated
with some trees, rocks and even store and house sprites.This chapter also talks about transitioning
from the background edges to another scene that you will set-up.Chapter 5 is a heavily scripting-oriented
chapter and has you create some NPCs and then set-up a conversation
system.This chapter also discusses co-routines
and how to use them in Unity.

Chapter
6 discusses places online to have maps drawn for you and alternately gives
advice on how to create your own game world map.The world map for the game is placed in your
project and a nice fade-in technique is used to transition between the world
map and the local scene for your player.

In
chapter 7 a battle system is created and the book explains how to have goblins
randomly spawn in your scene.In chapter
8 a shop is created so that you can purchase a sword to fight the goblins from
chapter 7.Both chapters discuss the
creation of an inventory system and how to add the sword stats as a bonus to
the battle system.

Chapter
9 talks about using a state system for the battle and also programming a user
interface system to keep the player informed about the battle.Everything seemed to work fine using the
‘old’ user interface system in Unity 4.6 beta.For those that don’t know the UI was quite significantly updated in
Unity 4.6; but all the code in the books seems to work fine.

Chapter
10 is all about creating particle systems for the battles in your RPG and chapter
11 discusses expanding the Unity editor to create some nice menus for your
game.I found chapter 11 a really
interesting read as I was not aware that you could expand Unity that much for
your own purposes.

Chapter
12 concludes the book with information on building your game for different
platforms.There is also a lot of links
listed presenting information on a variety of tutorials and tools for working
with Unity.